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Originally Posted by AdultKing
Are Google's webmaster guidelines that difficult to stay within that as many as 95% of this board's population can't follow them ? It's all good practice anyway and all aimed at ensuring that websites provide some value to end users (surfers).
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I couldn't care less what Google's guidelines are. Google's not some almighty God we should worship or beg for guidance. Google's a company. A company that wants to make money. A company that offers (free) services and information in order to attract traffic and then tries to monetize that traffic. Guess what I do? I run a business. I want to make money. I offer (free) services and information in order to attract traffic. I then try to monetize that traffic.
Google's not my friend. Google's a competitor. A competitor with a lot more resources and capital than me. A competitor that doesn't give a shit about me or my business.
Why does Google encourage webmasters to focus on 'good quality content'? Because they scrape and use that content as part of their business model.
Of course I'm smart enough to understand that I can benefit from the way Google uses the free services I offer. I'm also smart enough to understand that if a significant part of my income comes from Google, I'm in a vulnerable position. I therefor try to minimize that risk. How? By hiding as much as I can about what I'm doing from my competitors (including Google). After all, isn't Google doing exactly the same? They keep most of their inner workings a secret. They have their own disinformation agent. etc
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I think many webmasters miss out on enormous opportunity with their sites. Having a site that people enjoy visiting and trust buying from referral links is far better than having sites which serve not much purpose other than being link or spam farms.
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I get the impression your opinion about the matter is based on 2 assumptions:
1. That all sites that are promoted using seo tactics that violate Google's guidelines are not useful to visitors. (not enjoyable for users to visit).
2. That webmasters who don't violate Google's guidelines have nothing to fear from Google.
Make no mistake about it. Google doesn't give a shit about your site. They don't give a shit about your income. They care about THEIR income, not yours.
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If your site is highly desirable and of value to the surfer then it's in Google's interest to serve it up to the end user. Google can only maintain it's advertising revenue if it remains the most trusted search engine. That trust is upheld only by delivering the most relevant results to a users search query.
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How is Google supposed to know that your site is desirable and of value to the surfer. That is purely subjective. There's no such thing as an objective measure of usefulness. Google makes a guess about how many users have already displayed certain signs that they found a site to be useful to them. With billions of pages out there and Google only displaying a very limited amount of them to its users, I'd be insane if I didn't put any information out there that could be interepreted by Google as a sign of confidence in my sites.